POP QUIZ ASSHOLE - From "The Vaults" - Here's an, uh, 'audio tribute' I cut together after The Matrix came out. RUN DMC + German Porn music = Magic. (1:34 - June, 2001)

STANDING AT THE CROSSROADS - Another one from the pile of old cassette mixdowns... an 8-track (ADAT) song from the mid-nineties. I was wearing my influences on my sleeve for this one, for sure. Very wanna-be Nick Cave/Tom Waits. I used to really like this sort of genre-mimicking, then I was embarrassed by it, and now I accept it as being a fine exercise and not much else. The screaming at the end is pretty funny. (3:52 - 1996-ish)

RED CENT - A Tom-oldie that I like. It's a rather flawed demo that I recorded quietly in my bedroom one night, trying to not annoy my housemate sleeping on the other side of the wall. Which really gave it a weird low-key thing that I have grown fond of over years of listening to it. I am bound to re-record a 'proper' version of this song eventually, probably ruining it in some undefineable way, but that's all right by me. The lyrics are sort of crap. (3:40 - 1995)

BIG STINKYHEAD KID - Here's a very old song I wrote before I ever heard Beck. It is rather short and nonsensical and pitch-shiftastic. (:50 - 1992-1994?)

EASY FEELING GOOD TIME - An instrumental track from, oh, 1992-1995ish? 4-track recording, sloppy, unrehearsed. If you listen closely, you can hear crap that was on the cassette before I recorded over it. Is that a fretless bass? I didn't think I owned a fretless bass back then. Weird. Likely to be resurrected in an upcoming radio segment as background music. (2:19 - 1994?)

Labels: 1994, 1995, 1996, 2001, 2005, Audio, Music

(Artwork: Matt Smith - Story: Tom Pappalardo) The blurb: "Find out what Alec Dear, the mischievous gasmask-wearing dead guy does when he finds himself in the burn victim unit of a secluded children's hospital!" Zowie fun times! Alec Dear was written by me, mostly while sitting behind the cash register at an All For A Dollar store in a mall in Salem, NH in the early nineties. A perfect setting to write grotesque horror, if you ask me. I tried drawing it, but knew my good buddy Matt Smith had more talent and vision than I did, so he took on the art side of things. He worked on it in Massachusetts, New York, and maybe New Orleans. He applied for a Xeric grant and scored a little money for printing. It was later heavily tweaked and released by Caliber comics in 1998. Alec Dear is free with purchase of another comic or a poster, if you email and let me know. I've got boxes of these fuckers! Read the reviews here. See the cover: AD

Labels: 1996, Alec Dear, Comic Projects, Matt Smith, Self-Published

La Luna Es Negra was a story I worked on a lot the first couple years I was out in western Massachusetts. Much of it was drawn downstairs at the Haymarket, and most of the white-out is mixed with their delicious coffee. It was a story about a cowboy and a drunk guy driving around in a stolen custom 70s van fighting evil firemen. I actually completed the first 32-page issue before deciding it wasn't quite right. Story was wrong, art was wrong. It was, errr. ambitious, I guess? It had sort of a crunchy art style and alternated between prose and comic, and kept switching narrators and stuff. But in the end, it just wasn't very entertaining. Bits of La Luna eventually got resurrected, becoming the basis of Broken Lines. Here's a random page to look at.

Labels: 1996, Comic Projects

Here's a goofy two-page comic/story thing that appeared in the Styles section of the Boston Phoenix a-ways back in October, 1996. It's a story I wrote in college, and it is illustrated by the ever-talented badass, Mister Reusch. Take a look at 'er: Cover | Page One | Page Two

Labels: 1996, Comics, Mister Reusch, Published In

LOLLIPOP was/is a Boston-based music magazine. Some of the comic work I did for it ended up in my much-talked-about-but-seldom-purchased FAILURE, INCOMPETENCE collection, but here are some of the cover illustrations I did:

AUG 1996 - The editor's art direction was "I'm paying for full color covers... use every color." Yikes. I hated all the text put over it, I hated the pink logo, and I sort of hated my own drawing. Devout Standard Design readers will note the dog is a prototype of Banjo from Broken Lines.

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Labels: 1996, 1997, 2000, Illustration, Massachusetts

A REVIEW, TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY GOOGLE: Perhaps attention, a small jewel hides in your salesman of comic and if you do not hurry, there' will have some more! Through the Wood, beneath the moon (dark poem has) is as its name indicates it a poem. An illustrated poem. Just images illustrating of the text. A little with the manner of a book for child like… The Nightmare before Christmas de Tim Burton. The book, not the film. The poem which is much blacker than film.

It is the full moon. Appears Alec Dear, it carries a large dark coat, a wide hat and a gas mask of the second world war. This night, it will visit the sick children at the hospital because it trouble. It will try to go up the moral one to them…

They is at the same time magic and monstrous, luminous and sinks, childish and perverse. These is small jewels which was worth has its authors to gain a subsidy of Xeric Fondation (Foundation which helps the US authors) and who has one defect: A very ugly cover. (Paper is not formidable either but this small defect is transformed into quality because it allows “magic” transparencies)

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ANOTHER REVIEW, EXCEPT IT'S COHERENT: Creating a sense of horror in a comic book can be a daunting task these days. With the current profusion of wanton gore, insane clowns, and killer toys throughout the zine world, are there any novel ideas left to send chills down the collective spine of a jaded audience? Luckily for Caliber Comics, their new one-shot book successfully identifies and exploits one of those novel ideas: the nursery rhyme. While fairy tales have often been transformed into film horror (e.g. Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves), never before has a comic taken such a benign genre and twisted it into a more grotesquely frightening final product.

The main character of this Dr. Seuss-styled nightmare is Alec Dear, a merry soul who resembles a cross between Freddy Krueger and a Nazi soldier. Alec prances into a rural burn facility, sticking used lollipops on the heads of horribly deformed children and promising to rescue them from their critical conditions. As should be expected from a story that's subtitled "a dark poem," that rescue takes on a grim form as the hero pulls the children off their life-support systems one by one. After the local police and media stumble upon the purported samaritan, he begins a series of increasingly demented tactics to outsmart them, the most horrible of which involves dangling the children's lifeless bodies from their IV units and manipulating them like puppets for the captive audience outside the hospital.

The point of this Kevorkian escapade is questionable, but the authors' vivid illustrations and wonderfully fluid storytelling fit perfectly into the nursery-rhyme format. And although their rhyme techniques leave a bit to be desired ("But wait," mumbled Alec, "A clever idear!"; "Hey, clown!" he called out, "come stand over here!"), this magical yet maniacal diversion from the standard comic gorefest is quite entertaining. It provides horror not through severed limbs but through the repulsive behavior of a sick individual who, believing he's doing the right thing, seems disturbingly more real than any fairy tale. - Kemp Powers, City Pages (Minneapolis)

Labels: 1996, 1998, Alec Dear, Comic Reviews, Reviews